A series of polls last week suggested a surge in support for the United Kingdom Independence party (UKIP) in the run-up to Thursday's local and European parliament elections.

The Eurosceptic party's rise is "remarkable, but not entirely surprising," said the Sunday Express: "The British people are bursting to have their say on Europe." Moreover, divisions over Europe within both Labour and Conservative have allowed UKIP "to assume an importance beyond its size".

The party's biggest boost came on Wednesday, said Michael Portillo in the Sunday Times. That was when the Conservative leader, Michael Howard, devoted a speech to attacking it. "The Tory onslaught merely suggested that voting UKIP might not be so pointless after all," said Portillo. UKIP's "naked hostility" to the EU would appeal to "voters who like their politics to be clear-cut", he said. But in real politics, "populist resentment of Brussels is not enough."

"Without question, UKIP is an embarrassment to the Tories," said Matthew d'Ancona of the Sunday Telegraph. But it is "essentially a salon des refuses" - as proved by endorsements from public figures such as Robert Kilroy-Silk and Joan Collins. "With each of these drab endorsements, UKIP has looked less and less like a political movement and more like a nightmarish reality TV show: I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out Of Europe!" Any claims that the party represented a serious political force were "utter, unmitigated, fully-fledged nonsense".

In the Mail on Sunday, Peter Hitchens agreed UKIP was "a silly party with some very silly people in it". But, he argued, a vote for it could destroy the current system of "two corpses propping each other up" and lead to the creation of new political parties "neither bigoted nor politically correct, that actually put the interests of this country and its people first".

The People, however, warned that "those extremists standing for the far right ... are no laughing matter ... A vote for the UKIP is for toytown politicians with half-baked anti-European policies." Success for UKIP or the British National Party "would be a tragedy for democracy", it cautioned.